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The Cathedral In The Bazaar?

Posted by timothy on from the your-code-your-decision dept.

replicant_deckard writes "This opinion piece I wrote to Open explains how dual licensing (simultaneous use of both GPL and proprietary license) works. Dual licensing gives you basically both the support of the community and a profitable Microsoft-like business model. Seems that this model used by MySQL and TrollTech is getting more popular. Now my question is where are the limits?"

1 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. discrimination by Razzy · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    While dual licensing is fine in most cases (free for individuals, not for corporations), double-standards almost always spell a potential for danger. For example, what happens if someone decides their source is open to members of the Inuit community but closed to all other ethinic groups? Then we might have a problem. Worse yet, could the precedent set on the resulting court case place all dual licensing schemes into jeopardy? If the ruling were too broad (multiple licensing standards are illegal vs "group"-biased (race, ethnicity, sex, sex pref, etc) licensing is illegal) competitors could use this issue to destroy dual licensing schemes all together.